The Nazi occupation, unlike the Russian, split the Czech and Slovak entities along the traditional provincial lines from Austro-Hungarian days, and treated both harshly but favored the Czechs at least until the assassination of Heydrich. The Russian occupation, managed by quislings until 1968 and by Russian "advisors" thereafter, favored the Slovaks but paid lip service to Czechoslovak unity. Given this tangled history, it took a man of considerable political and verbal gifts to untangle these threads without his various constituencies winding up at one another's throats. That man was Vaclav Havel, playwright turned statesman, and this book is a collection of his speeches from the seminal winter and spring of 1989-1990.

The Czech is, as one might expect, beautiful and inspiring, even to a rusty student of this most Western of the Slavic languages. As a collection of speeches, it is lacking context -- not a problem if you lived through this remarkable period, but some years from now this will be a reference for scholars who have other sources for the history. It is also useful to students of war, peace and revolution, as a document of a nonviolent change from tyranny to freedom, but it would be more useful to most such scholars in English. Fortunately some of Havel's most important speeches of this period are contained in his widely available "The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice: Speeches and Writings, 1990-1996." 1st edition. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf; distributed by Random House, 1997. ( )